While the world awaits the launch of iPhone 17 with its promises of even better pixels and optimization, my Amazon wishlist is perhaps stuck in another timeline. Instead of sleek new devices, a bunch of digicams in eclectic shades of silver, hot pink, and maroon take up my entire Amazon cart at the moment. Somehow, this year has brought along with it the radical longing for an aesthetic most of us ditched almost a decade ago.
This year I find myself embroiled in what I would call a candid awakening. It brings with it the realization that I no longer am drawn to the sharp, glossy touches of phones that keep getting more advanced every year. Instead, the softer focus, muted flashes, and the grainy charm of digicam pictures are more up my alley. Where once my Instagram feed was riddled with extreme focus on the perfect angles, crisp lighting, and hectic editing, its trajectory has shifted to snapshots that are a little rough around the edges.
However, I realize that I am far from alone in witnessing and participating in this sudden shift. A dinner table conversation with my friends Shrika and Rishi, corroborated the noticeable comeback that the 2000s are making right now — the kind that is here to stay. Traversing through topics like fashion, music and what not, we spoke about how there is a crippling sense of generational exhaustion with how we curate our content that is looming over us. Somewhere between nostalgia and wanting to break out of it, there lies the fertile frustration that prioritizes imperfection in spheres that have always been heavily filtered. It was always perhaps just a matter of time until people had enough with modelling their online and offline personas after a perfectionist ideal. This is where perhaps the rejection of the constant pressure to maintain a highly edited aesthetic emerges. Perhaps this characteristic clinginess we still have to the 2000s, especially when it comes to music, serves as a powerful resistant response to said ideals, where raw and perhaps ill-fleshed out media is still better than highly edited fluff that had dominated the past decade for so long.
For me though, the desire to get a digicam isn’t just about hopping on a trend of resurgence. I have already hounded my friends with digicams enough for every event there is on campus. Always begging them to send me Google Drive links, I can envision myself becoming the designated photo importer as well, transferring hundreds of pictures from an SD Card to the laptop. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to be on the other end of it, having to deal with the slow transfer speeds and fast requests. The joy of candidly capturing others in their moments, and almost having an archival of my close ones, trumps all the trouble. I feel like the raw, accidental effect of the digicam pictures serves us all a much needed break from prim-proper curation.
Yet my hesitation still persists. Could digicams really be as timeless as people claim them to be? Or are they just a fleeting trend repackaged and marketed to a nostalgic generation again? Maybe I will let them stay in my wishlist for a little while longer, browsing through the trinkets that would go perfectly with them. I think maybe the real joy might not even be in the purchase itself, but the longing for ultimate relief from curatorial pressures that I atleast have all grappled with for far too long. Whether it is through apps that mimic filters of the digicam or through the camera itself, I think that the resurgence of imperfect curation dominating our online spaces only lays ground for further renewal — the kind that rewards unfettered authenticity yet again.